Generally, a contact center that receives customer inquiries such as questions, orders, and complaints is established in a company. Operators that deal with customer inquiries are placed in such a contact center. The number of operators placed in the contact center is determined based on past data (records of calls received from customers).
If the number of the operators is insufficient, the waiting time for customers is long, leading to increased abandoned calls, i.e., calls abandoned before being answered by an operator. Under such circumstances, it is impossible to respond to inquiries from customers satisfactorily, resulting in low customer satisfaction or loss of business opportunity.
On the other hand, if the number of operators is more than sufficient, personnel costs increase as well as other costs such as maintenance costs for the system and electricity costs. Consequently, measures are taken such as a review of working conditions to reduce costs and a reduction of personnel, leading to reduced morale among the operators.
Therefore, the number of operators to be placed in the contact center must be determined appropriately according to the number of received calls from customers. Conventionally, techniques of estimating the number of received calls from customers based on past records have been disclosed such as those described in for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication Nos. 2006-254094, 2007-142502, and 2007-189329.
For example, there is a technique of estimating the number of calls per hour based on a corrected number of calls calculated from the number of past calls each hour excluding the calls remade to the contact center because an operator could not answer the initial call.
Moreover, there is a technique in which the required number of operators is logically calculated using Erlang C formula corresponding to the number of calls, which varies according to hour and average handling time of an operator. The required number thus calculated is adjusted based on an estimated utilization according to an empirical rule of the administrator. Furthermore, there is a technique of estimating the number of customers that actually made calls, based on the average number of redials made by customers with respect to a service line and the number of calls received from customers.
However, the conventional techniques described above estimate the number of calls received during operating hours for which past records are available, using past records for calls received at a contact center. With such techniques, it is difficult to estimate changes in the number of calls received during extended operating hours if the operating hours of the contact center are extended because no records are available for hours beyond the operating hours.
Therefore, conventionally, changes in the number of calls during extended hours is estimated by guessing or the experience of an administrator of the contact center, and the number of operators to be placed in the contact center is acquired from the estimate. The number of operators is appropriately adjusted after the operation of the contact center has actually started, while accumulating record data.
However, such a method can still lead to reduced customer satisfaction and the loss of business opportunities, or increases in operating costs of the contact center due to an excessive number of personnel.
Furthermore, there is a method in which changes in the number of calls during extended operating hours is scaled based on past records of other companies in the same trade. However, it is difficult to achieve accurate scaling because patterns of the changes in the number of calls during the daytime (operating hours before extended hours) differ according contact center.